Wednesday, 22 November 2017

Otago Central Railway [23D]: Wedderburn updated

This is the Wedderburn site as it looks today.

The south end of Wedderburn in 1965. A rail trail accommodation business has been established on the site of the house that was in the lower left corner. At one time there were as many as five houses at Wedderburn, but three of them seem to have been removed after only a short time as even in a 1939 aerial photo there is no sign of them. No houses are there today. The loading bank seen upper right appears to be a high level bank with a front made out of old rails, probably lined with old sleepers, with earth banked up against it. The rail posts making up the front are still there today but the bank is in pretty poor shape otherwise. High level banks were designed to allow flatdeck trucks to be reversed up onto the top of the bank where they would tip their loads into high sided open wagons. Wedderburn had a coal mine operating nearby which loaded at the station so this may have been the traffic the bank was built to handle. The station building as mentioned in my previous post and shown below on its original site, had an annex added at the south end. These small annexes were common additions to station buildings. However when the buildings were moved, quite often the annex would be separated from the main building structure. This has happened at Wedderburn, Lauder and Waipiata. In the first two cases the station building that was returned in the rail trail era is missing the annex. Wedderburn had double home signals originally and there was a water tank at the south end next to these signals. The chainage charts show a backshunt off the shed road at the south end but this if built must have also been removed after a short life since it does not appear on the 1939 aerial photo.

North end of Wedderburn, 1965. The goods shed at upper left on its original site and next to it the low level loading bank. Low level banks were built to standard truck deck height and with a truck backed up against the bank on the ground, goods could be loaded across the bank to flatdeck or box wagons. They were much more common than the high level type and practically every station had one. The Wedderburn one has a concrete edge and still exists today. At the north end of the station platform (the platform is still in place today) was a toilet block marked as A, the foundations are all that is left. There was another water tank at one time further north from the station building. There were stock yards near the main road.

After the station closed the building and goods shed went to two separate sites and were moved back later on by the rail trail trust. They chose to place the buildings 200 metres north of their original locations, and in the case of the goods shed, it was placed on top of a corner of the former stockyards and the track that serviced these yards. Because of the potential for confusing the relocation with the NZR era I will need to publish two separate maps of this end of the yard, one for NZR and one for present, since the current location of the buildings is best not conflated with the NZR era.